Microsoft is making a bigger push to keep students and teachers using Windows this week. At the annual Bett education show in London, Microsoft is revealing new Windows 10 and Windows 10 S devices that are priced from just $189. The software giant is also partnering with the BBC, LEGO, NASA, PBS, and Pearson to bring a variety of Mixed Reality and video curricula to schools.

Lenovo has created a $189 100e laptop. It’s based on Intel’s Celeron Apollo Lake chips, so it’s a low-cost netbook essentially, designed for schools. Lenovo is also introducing its 300e, a 2-in-1 laptop with pen support, priced at $279. The new Lenovo devices are joined by two from JP, with a Windows Hello laptop priced at $199 and a pen and touch device at $299. All four laptops will be targeted towards education, designed to convince schools not to switch to Chromebooks.

I'm not sure if these wil persuade schools away from Chromebooks, but assuming non-education customers can get them as well, they may be great little machines for running secondary operating systems on.

Isn't it just sad? These same ones who sang the praises of the DRMED TO THE 100TH POWER Chromebook (again no dual boot, only a limited number of "approved OSes" can be run) start just slinging FUD and screaming the sky is falling when MSFT sees that some schools and businesses would like an OOTB easy to lock down solution and gives them what they want.

News Flash...Nobody is forcing you to buy this, you can buy a laptop with plain Jane Windows 10 or Linux or BSD if that strikes your fancy, so why all this FUD? Are you REALLY so scared of MSFT that you wet yourself at the thought of them offering an OPTION that Google has offered for how many years now?

That is how a free market works folks, if enough people want a product then multiple companies will try to create that product. Do you think Google created Chromebooks out of the goodness of their little hearts? They did it to get users using their services young, just as Apple did for years with the Macs in schools program.

News Flash...Nobody is forcing you to buy this, you can buy a laptop with plain Jane Windows 10 or Linux or BSD if that strikes your fancy, so why all this FUD? Are you REALLY so scared of MSFT that you wet yourself at the thought of them offering an OPTION that Google has offered for how many years now?

But don't you see, this is exactly my point. I know a lot of guys here like to paint things as "google vs microsoft" or "google vs apple", but this misses the bigger picture. *All* of them are taking another inch and justifying it by saying "we're just following their lead". It normalizes the erosion of our rights in the long term, just as I said before. The actions of the industry have to be taken collectively.

That is how a free market works folks, if enough people want a product then multiple companies will try to create that product. Do you think Google created Chromebooks out of the goodness of their little hearts? They did it to get users using their services young, just as Apple did for years with the Macs in schools program.

Sure, there is a need for products, nobody says that's bad in an of itself. What is bad is that these products are being designed to shift the balance of control away from owners and to corporations, that's the whole point here.

So in other words you are jumping through crazy logic hops because there are some people that WANT this? Are YOU gonna cut an extra 20% of your pay to schools so they can all afford an IT staff to write GPOs and enforce policies that these do OOTB?

This is the free market, news flash NOT EVERY ONE IS AN ADVANCED USER so they don't have the skills to lock down dozens and even hundreds of systems to insure they aren't infected with malware, you know this right? Hell I spent a decade in IT but if I had kids in school age? I'd be seriously tempted to buy one because I wouldn't have to spend half a day writing GPOs to lock the thing down.

The moral of the story? If you do not like it DO NOT BUY IT, we have more choices now that ever! You can buy new systems with Windows, OSX, Linux, BSD, hell you can even buy eComstation and run OS/2 Warp if that suits your fancy, so stop having a heart attack because some people want to actually have a system that isn't at constant risk for malware!

And sorry for the caps, apparently the latest update to Comodo Dragon has pretty much borked the Italic and Bold buttons so I can only use caps to highlight.